


Put the Dog Down

by Hihoneyimdead



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blood and Violence, Crack Treated Seriously, Dark Comedy, Fluff and Angst, Horror Elements, M/M, Magical Realism, Mutual Pining, Not Really Character Death, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Sharing a Bed, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-16
Updated: 2021-03-16
Packaged: 2021-03-24 23:28:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30079986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hihoneyimdead/pseuds/Hihoneyimdead
Summary: Yahaba Shigeru had his life figured out. Kind of. It's rather hard to get past the whole "killed a dude" thing, but he's fine with it. Mostly.But now his victim is back and won't stay dead, and it'sreallystarting to piss him off.(And, no, he does not have a crush on his victim, thank you very much, so stop saying so.)
Relationships: Kyoutani Kentarou/Yahaba Shigeru
Comments: 9
Kudos: 13





	Put the Dog Down

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dramaqueenweeb](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dramaqueenweeb/gifts).



> My friend (the co-author of sorts) and I made a joke in January about Yahaba being in jail post-timeskip because I hadn't seen up to that point in canon and it was _very_ funny. So here we are now. 
> 
> This is at best canon-adjacent. Like set in the actual post-timeskip world, but slightly to the left. You'll understand when you read it. Trust me on this. 
> 
> **Additional Author's Warnings:**
> 
> Knives, blood, just all sorts of funky murder shit. That's what the fic's gonna be about, mostly, so if you're not good with any sort of horror, I'd skip right out if I were you. Sorry. 
> 
> But besides the gross murder things, this is a relatively light-hearted fic, I think, so there's that.

It’s raining, because of course it is.

Shigeru checks his phone (three missed calls from Watari, a Snapchat notification from Oikawa, and a singular text from Kyoutani reading ‘Don’t forget the blanket this time’), groans when he sees the time, and drops his phone onto the bed next to him, rolling onto his other side and staring blankly at the opposing wall.

Three thirty-eight in the morning, and he has to be up for a job interview at eight. And then another job interview at noon. And then some time panicking and regretting, dinner, and bed. A full day. A good day full of potential and opportunity. He could get the store job. He could get the restaurant job. He could get both, or neither, or he could get hired by Hanamaki’s weird, plant-obsessed grandmother (again) to weed her garden (again) because her useless grandson is too busy making eyes at mall goths and watching _Naruto_ reruns to bother helping her (again.)

But Shigeru thinks that he would rather get, say, stabbed in the temple with a rusty screwdriver than get dirt under his nails again. He couldn’t get it out, even after hours bent over his sink scrubbing with an old toothbrush and soap and water. The water drained red with clay. No one is going to ask, but he’ll say that he was doing some gardening with his mother.

Thunder. Lightning. A flash illuminates the room, casting a shadow of the tree outside of Shigeru’s window against the far wall, neatly boxed in by the window frame. Thunder again, and Shigeru flinches as it nearly shakes the apartment. It’s the gods, surely. They’re bowling. They’re bowling, and they’re losing.

He jumps as he hears a knock at the door. Slowly sits up and checks the time on his phone. Only a minute since he last checked.

Another knock.

The gods sent a messenger to ask him to come upstairs and play. They should’ve asked Kunimi. Shigeru’s shit at bowling (he’s a croquet man, what can he say?)

“I hear nothing,” Shigeru tells the door.

A single pound at the door, eerily familiar, like a rabid dog running headfirst into a door trying to break it down to rip a man’s throat out and call him a bitch.

“There is only silence,” Shigeru tells the door.

“I can hear you talking to yourself,” the dog snaps, voice muffled and garbled by the wood and the thunder and the blood. “Open the damn door already!”

Shigeru drops his phone onto his bed. No.

“No.”

“Did you seriously just fucking tell me ‘no’?”

“How did it even hear that?” Shigeru mutters, pressing his face into shaking hands and desperately trying to will the tears from falling again. He’s dehydrated. Hallucinating!

“I’m an it now?”

His hands smell like blood. Even the best lavender hand soap ¥1000 could buy couldn’t get rid of the smell. It couldn’t get rid of the clay, either, or the gummy residue from the sticker he peeled off of an apple that morning, or the mud.

Well. This time, he’ll spend more on better soap.

Shigeru pushes the blankets off of him and onto the floor, sniffs once, and wipes under his eyes. Same as last time, right? Just one stab, and-

“Dude, are you crying?”

Shigeru scowls and slams the door right back in the zombie’s face. There is an immediate shout, and then a thud, and another thud, and another, and- oh, God, _did he fall down the fucking stairs_?

Shigeru looks up at the ceiling, curses the gods once, and grabs a baseball bat from by the television and yanks the door open, looking into the dark hallway outside of his apartment. There’s no immediate zombie-hell-creature-thing, so he turns his gaze downwards, and-

“Well,” he says, voice all too loud against the velvety silence of an empty stairwell. There’s a flash of lightning that illuminates the body, but no thunder. “That was easy.”

He could go right back to bed now. He should. He has that interview, and he’s also going to have to spend entirely too much time in the morning explaining to his landlord why exactly there is a dead body in the landing of his new apartment complex. He’s killed the manifestation of his guilt, he’s read enough books to know that he should be fine now. Gonna wake up in the morning and sing with the damn birds, probably.

He doesn’t realize that he’s crouched over the body until it twitches and reaches for his ankle.

“Yahaba, I swear to _God-_ ”

Shigeru absolutely does not scream, because he prides himself on being cool under pressure. He does, however, slam his baseball bat so hard into the corpse’s head that it caves in with a sick sort of squelching sound. The body lays still again.

Shigeru stands there for a moment breathing heavily before slowly raising his bat and, after another moment of debating how likely another sudden revival is, nudges the body with the end of the bat until it rolls onto its side.

Kyoutani blinks.

Shigeru drops the bat, eyes wide as plates and hands shaking faster than a high-intensity vibrator, and backs up, tripping on the bottom step and falling back onto his ass, knocking his head against the step above (it would be funny if the body wasn’t _right fucking there_.)

Kyoutani’s body twitches once, twice, and Shigeru claps a hand over his mouth to muffle a scream as Kyoutani’s- well, what used to be Kyoutani’s head reforms, and he can’t even manage a scream, a yell, a wheeze, _anything_ , as Kyoutani slowly pushes himself to his knees, then to his feet, rounding on Shigeru with a bloody glare.

Shigeru is frozen. There is blood on Kyoutani’s temple from that evening. There is blood in his teeth as he bares them, looking more pissed than he has since second year. There is blood trickling down his nose, drip-drip-dripping onto the floor in an uneven rhythm.

“You don’t even have the guts to look me in the eyes after you killed me three times?” Kyoutani growls, all _Mad Dog_ and no _Kentarou_. A hint of a smile teases the corner of his mouth, and it’s all Shigeru can focus on. His smile, and how he thought he would never see it again. But it’s quickly gone, replaced with a sneer.

He steps forward and places his foot on Shigeru’s chest. “Pussy.”

Shigeru can’t even argue, can only shrug blandly, vacantly, and pat Kyoutani’s calf vaguely. “Nice to see you, too. Please get off of me. I just washed this shirt.”

Kyoutani, after a moment, steps back, arms crossed, still very much unhappy. Shigeru, unfortunately, can relate.

Ten minutes later, Kyoutani is in the shower and Shigeru has a kitchen knife in one hand and his phone in the other as he paces around his apartment.

“This is a problem because…?” Watari asks. He yawns, and Shigeru can hear him rustling on the other end of the line. “Isn’t it good that he’s not dead?”

Watari has always been way too chill about everything, even back in their first year of high school when one of the other first years had broken his nose and coughed up enough blood to drown a pig in. Watari had just stood there with a towel to the first year’s nose as Shigeru hovered awkwardly in the background waiting for Hanamaki to return with ice and their then-captain pulled Kyoutani outside of the gym to lecture him on the power of his spikes (again.)

_“It’s not that bad,”_ Watari had calmly said, blood seeping through the towel and onto his fingers. _“I’ve seen worse.”_

It’s been nearly a decade since then, and Shigeru still doesn’t know how his friends manage to get by without getting arrested. With Watari and the Pasta Incident, Oikawa’s grudge against Karasuno’s Kageyama, Iwaizumi’s grudge against Oikawa’s grudge against Karasuno’s Kageyama, and Kunimi’s remarkable ability to run every red light in the city without a license, well. It’s a surprise that Shigeru is going to be the first one behind bars.

“No!” Shigeru hisses. He glances towards the bathroom. Kyoutani is singing. Fucking kill him. “And should you really be talking about this that calmly?”

“I’ll be more panicked in the morning, don’t you worry. How’s he holding up?”

“He’s singing the snowman song.”

“Which one?”

“Which one do you think.” A pause as the shower turns off. “Does it count as murder if he’s already dead?”

“Are you sure you killed him in the first place? Knowing you, you probably got halfway through and decided to call it a night.”

Shigeru looks down at his nails, over at the bloody baseball bat sticking soaking in his kitchen sink, and back down at his nails. He balances his phone on his shoulder and closes his hand in a fist once.

Kyoutani didn’t have time to scream, but Shigeru can hear his wheeze of a groan of a final breath over the rain and the thunder. The sickening _shlunk_ has the screwdriver hit and dug in. The splash his body made as it hit the river.

His hand is still warm where Kyoutani held it, and isn’t that hilarious?

“I’m sure,” Shigeru says. He gives an awkward wave as Kyoutani exits the bathroom wearing nothing but a worn pair of Shigeru’s sweatpants that haven’t been touched since high school. A neon green flamingo-print towel hangs loose around his neck. Shigeru doesn’t remember buying or owning it. “Ask him yourself.”

He angles his phone out for Kyoutani, who just sneers and says, “Fuck off,” before storming into Shigeru’s bedroom and slamming the door shut.

The bat rolls in the sink with the impact, and a clock falls off of the wall above the stove.

“See?” Watari asks, sounding significantly more chipper than he was a moment ago. “He sounds just fine.”

“Yeah, that’s the problem,” Shigeru sighs. He absently tosses the knife onto the dining table and goes to collapse on the couch with a light groan. “Hey, you’re a scientist, right?”

“I work in a zoo gift shop.”

Shigeru ignores him. “Is it possible for the dead to come back to life?”

“Oh, no, but I’m not entirely sure you killed him in the first place. You two seemed close when I moved.”

Shigeru winces and swallows a sudden bout of nausea. “Yeah, no, things changed.”

“Huh.” Watari is silent for a long moment, then he quietly says, “Sorry. I’m not gonna ask.”

“I wasn’t gonna tell.”

“So… other than the whole being alive thing, how’s he holding up?”

“He’s pissed.”

“What else is new? At least he isn’t throwing things.”

As if on cue, something in Shigeru’s room smashes.

Watari quietly laughs. “I stand corrected.”

“I’m going to kill him,” Shigeru says. He stares up at the ceiling. There’s already a mold stain up there; it looks like a sad fox.

“You know, you say that, but do you really mean it?”

“Uh, yeah. I’ve done it three times in the past 24 hours.”

“I’m not convinced. The Yahaba I knew in high school wouldn’t kill a man, let alone his spunky best friend.”

“I could kill you instead.”

“You can certainly try!” Watari laughs, louder this time. Shigeru could swear the mold stain’s ‘mouth’ twists into a smile, but that could just be the lightning. “We both know you can’t drive!”

“I’m working on it.”

“Yeah, sure. Hey, it’s late. Call me in the morning after your interview, okay? If he’s still alive, tell him to call, too. I miss him.”

Shigeru scowls. “Absolutely not.”

“Alright, whatever you say. Better get in there before he breaks another window.”

He hangs up before Shigeru can even ask.

By the time Shigeru crawls into bed, it’s four o’clock on the dot. He has to be awake in two hours. Maybe if he’s lucky, Kyoutani will strangle him in his sleep.

Unfortunately, Kyoutani just grunts and scoots over to give him enough room to lie down before flipping onto his side and facing the window. Fair.

“Can you still drive me to my interview tomorrow?” Shigeru asks.

“I lost my keys in the river,” Kyoutani replies. “And my wallet. Asshole.”

“Sorry.”

It’s cold. Colder than it was when Shigeru left his bed half an hour ago. Brief consideration reveals that it’s Kyoutani acting as an ice block. Bodies cool down slower than that, though, right?

Shigeru shivers and pulls his blanket over his head, slips his hand under his pillow, gripping _it_ tightly. Maybe if he’s lucky, he’ll freeze to death in his sleep.

“You still up for lunch tomorrow?” Kyoutani asks.

“Can you even eat anymore?”

“Hope so. I think I’d die if I couldn’t eat Iwaizumi’s cooking again.”

“You know, you are the one person who can eat that shit without dying. Maybe it’s better if you do.”

“Do what, die? Tried that, didn’t stick. No thanks to you.”

“What, you think I _wanted_ you to come back to life?” Shigeru frowns. “It was supposed to be a done deal. No takesy-backsies.”

“‘Takesy-backsies’?” Kyoutani scoffs. “What are you, eight?”

“Fuck off, I’m going through a crisis here.”

“ _You’re_ going through a crisis? I’m fucking dead!”

“Well you obviously aren’t. You’re talking, aren’t you?”

“Yeah.” Kyoutani quiets, just a little. “I am, aren’t I.”

Shigeru sighs. “I’m not going to say I’m sorry.”

“I didn’t expect you to. You’re the most stubborn piece of shit asshole I’ve ever met.”

“The fuck does being stubborn have to do with anything? I’m glad I killed you, and I’m glad you’re back so I can do it right next time.”

“Like there’s going to be a next time.”

Shigeru grips his hand under the pillow, and, in a flash, sits up and drives the knife right into the side of Kyoutani’s throat. His blood is cold. He gurgles briefly before going slack.

Shigeru lets out a breath and wipes the blood and tears off of his face with the hem of his shirt. He lets the knife fall to the bed by his knees, and waits.

**Author's Note:**

> Follow me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/hihoneyimdying?s=21) if you want for me complaining about my wips and previews of things to come. Currently I'm complaining about either this fic or its sister fic, a happy little matsuhana side story that might involve eldritch gods and cults. 
> 
> I have a bit more of this written, so I think it'll have a relatively regular update schedule. Maybe once every other week if I'm lucky. Isn't that novel? I didn't edit this and probably won't, but I guess a beta would be welcome if anyone wanted to be one for whatever reason. Just shoot me a dm on twitter or something. That's what the kids do these days, right?


End file.
